Good TBI TV — TBI Life

TV is tricky. It's the default low-intensity "I'm sick around the house with nothing to do" activity, but it can also trigger. I'm a big fan of 'great tv' (The Wire, Mad Men....etc) but trying to watch these shows is an exercise in frustration. You'll either be diligent in listening to your body and have to pause all the time or close your eyes to listen and miss out on a lot of subtlety, or the shows will be too good that you'll watch too much and overexert. What you thought of as good TV probably isn't the same as good TBI tv. So, what makes for good TBI TV?

1. You can watch by listening half the time and not miss much

2. Relatively formulaic

3. By and large uplifting

Some suggestions:

The Great British Bake Off

Unlike US-based cooking shows like Chopped and Top Chef, The Great British Bake Off is super super chill. The shots are really slow, and since its baking instead of cooking there's alot of waiting around and drama in whether stuff will come out of the oven right. Everyone's friendly and supportive and both the hosts and contestants come off as decent people.

Spencer Ackerman described it as "televised Lexapro for an anxious world, an idyll where ambition, creativity, competition and glory co-exists with warmth, generosity, fellowship and grace."

You can find one season on Netflix (it's called The Great British Baking Show) and others on various corners of the internet and youtube. Maybe it will even inspire a new hobby!

The Profit

They did some study saying that where Teen Mom teen pregnancy went down. I'd like to think the same has happened for shows like Shark Tank and The Profit and American entrepreneurship.

The cuts are faster than Great British Baking Show but still relatively slow. Marcus Lemonis also seems like a decent human being.

My favorite shows are the ones where the business owners are relatively humble and don't get into big shouting matches. You can find a site that highlights them here.

Sports?

Sports are a tricky one. Oftentimes when sports are at their best you get too invested in the game, lose track of your limits, and overexert. My biggest setback I had involved a long day where I knew I should've just gone to sleep at 8pm...but game 6 of what turned out to be a classic between OKC and the Dubs was on. If you're a fan, try to be mindful that live sports can really tempt you to break a "ten min on/ten min off" screen regimen because you want to be on twitter seeing what everyone else is saying about the last Kyrie crossover.

And a final word to the wise: Stay away from illegal streams! Wading through flashing pop-ups and watching blurry live feeds with low resolution and frame rates can really mess with your brain.